taibbi narcissism

How Much Did "The Culture of Narcissism" Get Right? Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch described a soulless society headed toward a "war of all against all." Looking back at a book TK readers chose for review Matt Taibbi Jan 17 1,139 1,181 It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. — Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism Back in 1979, social critic Christopher Lasch wasn’t buying the idea that Americans in the sex-drugs-and-disco era were actually having fun. “This hedonism is a fraud,” he wrote. “The pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative… they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit.” Lasch’s reasoning traced to the beginning of American society. The Puritans embraced the idea of getting rich, but “saw personal aggrandizement as incidental to social labor” and “instructed men who prospered not to lord it over neighbors.” Puritans gave way to Yankees and their Protestant work ethic, which imagined prosperity as a reward for hard work, but also for “self-discipline, the training and cultivation of God-given talents, above all the cultivation of reason.” A century later, the ideal of self-improvement gave way to what Lasch called a “cult of competitive industry,” as people like P.T. Barnum began to evangelize a more brutally self-interested version of the Ben Franklin Yankee ideal. The new idea was to strive for worldly success “without Franklin’s concern for the attainment of wisdom.” Instead of pursuing an abstract goal of discipline and self-denial, American society became more openly organized around competing and beating one another to the top. In the twentieth century, mass media promoted a new religion of self-care that stressed turning one’s whole self into an engine of such competitive ascent. People gobbled up magazine articles about “the art of conversation,” fashion, and “culture,” as the “management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement.” New stresses on “winning friends and influencing people” now replaced the old ideals of self-discipline and thrift, leading, as Lasch put it, to a stage of history where “the pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it.” By the sixties and seventies, America became an intrinsically performative society, a vast population that didn’t particularly distinguish between public and private life, and for whom image was as important as inner reality. Even foreign policy was understood as an effort to manipulate how other nations perceived us. One of the creepier revelations of the Pentagon Papers was that we even waged war in places like Vietnam with an eye out for how our actions would be perceived by “relevant audiences,” e.g. the Communists, the South Vietnamese, America’s Western allies, and the American public. As society at home became more organized around corporate climbing, our lives became an endless, round-the-clock effort to “excite admiration or envy,” where everything from “assertiveness therapy” to jogging to est helped the individual be better armed in the struggle for personal advancement. This, apparently, is what Christopher Lasch saw when he looked at Americans grooving to Saturday Night Fever. These were not groups of people letting loose and having fun. They were profoundly lonely people grinding away the anxiety of life in a market-based society stripped of all its ameliorative restraints, where “pleasure becomes life’s only business” in a dystopian “war of all against all.” In such a society, a narcissistic orientation isn’t deviance or illness, but a crucial adaptive strategy, with the unfortunate side-effect mentioned above: a growing inability to see the words fuck and fuck over as having different meanings. I started to spot reporters reading The Culture of Narcissism on the campaign trail in 2015. It was one of many books press folk began speed-reading at the beginning of the Donald Trump presidential run. Others included the historical analysis The Paranoid Style in American Politics (written by one of Lasch’s mentors, Richard Hofstadter) and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Any tracts about narcissism or cults of personality were gobbled up as fodder for Trump analyses. I didn’t read those and instead read up on corporate sales and businesses like pro wrestling, because Trump was speaking a language I didn’t understand that apparently came from places like that. Reading The Culture of Narcissism now, it’s clear it’s very much worth reading, but anyone who does so in search of a narrow explanation for Trump is crazy and sure to be disappointed. This is a seething, complicated book that hurls razor blades in all directions, and seems almost to have been written with the specific intent of avoiding appropriation by political opportunists. In what feels like an amusingly familiar phenomenon, Lasch is often bitterly condemned by ideologues on both the right and the left, who seem determined to put him in more comprehensible boxes, even if he doesn’t really fit in any. For instance, Lasch’s skepticism about America’s cultural advances often led critics to make the incorrect logical leap that he was praising what had been left behind. E.J. Dionne, writing in an introduction to a new edition in 2018, noted that original New York Times Book Review critic Frank Kermode “scathingly” wondered if Lasch by criticizing modern life was proposing to restore the “right to be poor, to be beaten in childhood, constrained by a savage penal system, compelled to suffer through an unhappy marriage, to be openly instead of covertly exploited, and to die young.” This is a preposterous reading of a book whose descriptions of Yankee morality were as absent of enthusiasm as is possible without being insulting. At most, Lasch seemed to be saying it was better to have a few “shreds” of private spiritual ambition than to be completely consumed by image, appearance, and competition. For this, critics on the left denounced him as a hater of modernity and appear to have assumed, by the transitive property of whatever, that he was also an enemy of everything from feminism to education reform. Critics on the right, while approving of some of Lasch’s defenses of family, honed in on the more urgent criticism of the book, its deep concern about competitive capitalism as the organizing principle of society. Here again, critics assumed that by leveling a complex, nuanced criticism of A, Lasch was stumping for simplistic solution B. In this case, they thought he was pushing the “ancient dream of the Left,” a big-government remake. Even the most superficial reading, however, makes it clear Lasch was no cookie-cutter leftist. The Culture of Narcissism didn’t predict Trump exactly, but it did a pretty fair job of predicting the tensions of the Trump era. There’s a section at the start of The Culture of Narcissism that seems like it describes the two poles of modern American culture: Narcissism thus appears simply as the antithesis of that watery love of humanity (disinterested “love for the stranger”) advocated by [Erich] Fromm under the name of socialism. Lasch was interested in the problem of rising anxiety in a society that struggles to integrate the goals of personal fulfillment and meaningful social change. Post-sixties Americans lost the ability to view these goals as anything but contradictory, a state of mind that resulted in alternating cycles of despair and aggression. Trump, far from just representing the narcissism side of a see-saw that had socialist activism at the other end, seems in retrospect to be both a product of, and a reaction to, a slew of breakdowns in society that were visible even forty years ago. Lasch is brutal in his autopsy of sixties radicalism, especially when it came to looking at the post-sixties vocations of the leading revolutionaries. He describes how Jerry Rubin, the “Yippie” partner of Abbie Hoffman, left radical politics at thirty and moved across the country sampling – “on an apparently inexhaustible income,” Lasch acidly notes – consciousness fads like bioenergetics, gestalt therapy, rolfing, hypnotism, and acupuncture. He lost weight, got in shape, and talked incessantly about how at 37, he looked more like 23. As far as his inner life went, he stopped chasing women by learning “to love myself enough so that I do not need another to make me happy.” More than that, however, seventies Rubin learned to look back with disdain at the “puritan conditioning” that in his sixties radical days occasionally made him uneasy with the rewards of fame and money. His new smorgasbord of spiritual tools made him realize that “it’s O.K. to enjoy the rewards of life that money brings.” Revolutionaries like Rubin were essentially learning to embrace selling out, a message that would become attractive to people who came of age in the “Me Generation.” Formerly scruffy, bearded anarchists were now shaving, grooming, and working their abs, because as Lasch noted, the “fear of growing up and aging haunts our society.” Trump with his weird scalp-reduction and unnatural electric-rust-mustard hair (or whatever color it is now that isn’t gray) would later be symbolic of this, too. This is not to say he’s an age-advanced Jerry Rubin, but elements of his personality were clearly shaped by these trends that consumed people of his age in the seventies. Meanwhile, another wing of society was reacting to sixties upheavals with a different pose. The earnest confessional novels that dominated the sixties were looked back upon with embarrassment ten years later. To some, it had become clear that the trajectory of the intellectual celebrity of the sixties was seemingly sincere critical self-reflection, followed by open commoditizing of self-absorption: Once having brought himself to public attention, the writer enjoys a ready-made market for true confessions. Thus Erica Jong, after winning an audience, by writing about sex with as little feeling as a man, immediately produced another novel about a young woman who becomes a literary celebrity. In reaction to this, the seventies produced irony by the truckful, not just in goofy hedonistic musical genres like disco, and in increasingly schlocky TV, but even among the minds that would have been serious social commentators a few decades previously. Lasch singled out satirists like Donald Barthelme and Woody Allen as being preoccupied with “[waiving] the right to be taken seriously, at the same time escaping the responsibilities that go with being taken seriously.” Allen’s books and movies in particular were romps about the absurdities of intellectualism and analysis, with lines like, “What is it that bothers me about death so much? Probably the hours,” and, in Sleeper, “Political solutions don’t work.” Reading this criticism from forty years ago, you can see the outlines of reactionary movements in both directions. The modern progressive left seems to have grown up feeling special hatred for the Allen types who stared into the void and made glib jokes rather than trying to do something about life’s injustices (it’s notable that a lot of the irony-merchants mentioned in Culture of Narcissism are now pariahs). Of course, a big part of the humor of the Barthelmes and Allens came from the post-sixties conclusion that after all that upheaval, it turned out the only things that still mattered were, as Allen put it, “sex and death – two experiences that come once in a lifetime.” (Incidentally, to the extent that Lasch supports any point of view, the idea that love, family, wisdom, and humor are immutable keys to life seems to ring true with him). However, world-weary humor today is seen as a stalking-horse for inaction, or worse, bigotry. Meanwhile, the Rubins of the world who left the joking behind to become earnest apostles of modern progressive life grew up to be the people at the center of another trend described in a Lasch book from 1994, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy. That book — which was significantly about the ex-concerned who became self-indulgent, stateless elitists in the End of History age — ripped the Clinton-era professional class as having “retained many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.” By previewing the disgusted reaction to such people, it predicted a lot of the themes of Trumpian “drain the swamp” rhetoric. Lasch looked at the evaporation of noblesse oblige far more in the spirit of a book like Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges, than through the lens of someone like Trump. He was concerned with the growing economic distance between the wealthiest citizens and everyone else, and argued that globalization made the managerial class increasingly like tourists in their own countries. The decision of that key stratum of educated, upper-class, largely urban members of society to distance itself from responsibility to participate in the upkeep of society as a whole, while becoming expert at self-care, made it unable to see widespread problems of income inequality, collapsing cities, etc. The people David Brooks would later call “Bobos in Paradise” (i.e. “Bourgeois Bohemians”) were, like Rubin, great cultural shoppers who were brilliantly attentive to their own images. Their idea of being socially responsible was having good taste, whether in politics or furniture. They succeeded because they were the most accomplished at fusing their political ideas and inner needs for fulfillment with the limitations of modern capitalism. Trump built a movement around blaming these people for inattention to decaying Middle America. That he was himself an extreme caricature of someone raised in the Me Generation was immaterial. He scored points with the vast population of people left behind by this generation of aristocrats-turned-tourists, who now lived in wealth archipelagoes with little real connection to the rest of the country. Trump preached two big ideas, both designed to strike a chord with the latter group. First, he promised a cliché reactionary return to the good old days of “Great” America, which either meant a return to privilege (the left conception) or a clearing from the “swamp” of plutocrats who’d sold out the nation to fluff their own little nests, replacing them with Patriots who’d restore a strong America (the Trumpian version). I don’t think it’s necessary to litigate which description of “Make America Great Again” was more accurate, since to me it was always the less important of Trump’s promises. No one watching the pussy-grabbing braggart-hedonist Trump could imagine people accepting him as the leader of a “conservative” movement celebrating family and traditional values. What he really represented was a more honest recognition of what America was really all about, a less disguised cultural ideal. Trump’s route to power was through the Republican Party, whose last presidential candidate had been Mitt Romney. Everything about Romney was fake. When he wore jeans to try to tone down his Wall Street vibe, they looked as natural as chaps or a hoop dress. His pitch was that Barack Obama was a statist who didn’t understand free enterprise and that he, Romney, would bring “jobs” back, especially for the little guy, the only problem being that Romney in fact was a private equity vampire whose expertise was in liquidating jobs, not creating them. In retrospect, Romney might have won if he’d kicked off his campaign bragging to voters about how he became fabulously wealthy as a greed-sick finance pirate somehow paying a lower tax rate than teachers and cops. After all, he had the exact same job and morals as takeover artist Gordon Gekko, a fictional character many Americans to this day don’t understand was supposed to be a villain. Romney’s real message was Gekko’s: “Greed works.” Americans by 2012 hated upper management enough that they might have bought a speech like Gekko’s famous “survival of the unfittest” speech reaming the parasites at Teldar Paper: Romney wimped out and instead hid behind platitudes like “the promise of America,” and “making trade work.” The phoniness paved the way for Trump, who had the stones to try the Gekko act for real. He was the human embodiment of “greed, in all of its forms… greed for life, for money, for love” (well, sex with porn stars) that by capturing “the essence of the evolutionary spirit” would save “that other malfunctioning corporation, called the U.S.A.” Just by tossing out the pretense that politicians are beacons of rectitude and being undisguisedly himself, Trump won over Republican voters, crushing the old fake Republican message. Just like Gekko, he promised he would restructure America by draining the crooked deadweight. Most of all, however, he sold a proletarian version of the dream of unrestrained self-indulgence the city-dwelling Bobos in Paradise had already claimed for themselves, as Lasch described in Revolt of the Elites. Trump voters wanted to give just as little of a fuck as the rich phonies in organized politics who long ago bailed on America as a national idea, shipping jobs overseas, sucking wealth upward, and allowing Wal-Mart and Amazon to decimate towns even as they wept for our national symbols. Romney was symbolic of this, a man with a perfect mannequin-like exterior whose Bain Capital liquidated companies like KB Toys and the jobs that went with them, then turned around on the campaign trail and saluted the Statue of Liberty, Neil Armstrong, and the “greatest military the world has ever seen,” as if he were some kind of patriot. The Culture of Narcissism predicted that the various strains of permissible thought in modern America would eventually be fused under one demented, (literally) sadistic state. Combine a culture of unlimited consumption and an increasingly open cult of the self, and you get a future indistinguishable from the fantasies of the Marquis de Sade. Lasch wrote about how Sade’s ideal society, in which no one had the right to refuse to be the object of anyone else’s desire, was the apotheosis of “the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects.” I don’t think it’s an accident that the dominant political trends on the left today denounce as corrupt, if not as actively exploitative, nearly all of our previous liberal traditions stressing a separate and protected inner life, from the nuclear family to religion to the Bill of Rights. The fashion is to view all human interaction as power contests where even in sex someone always wins and someone always loses. Openly now, no difference between fucking and fucking over. This vision of equity as promised in woke ideology is a lot closer to Sade’s idea of a world “where everyone has the right to everyone else,” and people have a “universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed,” than it is to the far tamer-in-comparison Marxist concept of economic and political leveling. This Brave New World doesn’t just target private property, but privacy, and all bourgeois conceptions of it, as anathematic to progress, and needing to be wiped out. The current America that is divided into two permanently competing groups, with no other individual identities recognized as legitimate, is a symptom of the elimination of private, inner life as a political goal in itself. The Culture of Narcissism doesn’t envision a brake on our journey toward that hell. The right can be expected to promote the ideology of unrestrained greed, in both financial and (as in the case of Trump and the ex-sixties sellouts) personal forms. The ostensible opposition to this on the progressive left will attack as corrupt even the most natural private traditions, be it parental rights or respecting elders. Both movements will end up being sublimated to something not much different and certainly not better than what we’re leaving behind, as Lasch puts it: Ostensibly egalitarian and antiauthoritarian, American capitalism has rejected priestly and monarchical hegemony only to replace with the hegemony of the business corporation… A new ruling class of administrators, bureaucrats, technicians, and experts… How and why do we give power over to those experts? By being impressed with their ability to handle extreme situations. This is why, Lasch writes, in a passage that is eerie in how correct it turned out to be, that “propaganda seeks to create in the public a chronic sense of crisis.” We’re whipped into a panic, then relieved by the apparent competence of this or that group to lead us out of it. In fact, however, we’re just being led into a purer version of our sadistic “war of all against all,” in which human beings and their traditions are replaceable, but the corporate state remains. The latter grows stronger as we battle each other for envy, admiration, and things, in a utopia of mandatory competition and self-absorption. Even truth is now settled in trial-by-combat fashion, by the competition for attention. Lasch in addition to everything else predicted a future in which being correct or incorrect, right or wrong, would become secondary to the ability to “command assent.” Truth becomes a numbers game: the person who can demand belief, either by force or by the creation of the most successful image, is right. I devoured this book, but can see why so many critics couldn’t stand it. The Culture of Narcissism isn’t a friend to anyone’s movement. It’s just a description of where we are and where we’re going, and the news isn’t particularly great, though it’s expressed in a fascinating way. This might be why he’s out of style, to some. Food for thought isn’t worth much, in the performative state. Look forward to discussing more in the comments… 1,139 1,181 ← Previous Write a comment… Sasha Stone23 min ago Good piece. I would still urge you to read either the Fourth Turning or Pendulum to see how any of this fits in with that. "I don’t think it’s an accident that the dominant political trends on the left today denounce as corrupt, if not as actively exploitative, nearly all of our previous liberal traditions stressing a separate and protected inner life, from the nuclear family to religion to the Bill of Rights. The fashion is to view all human interaction as power contests where even in sex someone always wins and someone always loses. Openly now, no difference between fucking and fucking over." -- particularly good paragraph. Part of Trump's appeal is certainly sticking it to the left, which had spent eight years under Obama perfecting our utopian diorama - how "good" we could be. Good liberals who drove a hybrid, did yoga, at organic and cared about the environment then lectured everyone else for all of their continual failings of not being able to live up to that ideal. But I didn't really get the line between educated and uneducated until Trump and just how many people in this country really aren't educated and they always prefer Trump. Why, because they UNDERSTAND him. He went to college but he does not seem to have learned much. Every typo on Twitter made them love him more. Right? Because the left is in constant sneer mode at them. Anderson Cooper and everyone else looks down their nose at the "deplorables" - making fun of their clothes, their weight, their makeup, their hair. Does the left think this plays? Because it doesn't. 1Reply 1 reply SherryJan 18 Taibbi's evisceration of American culture and society bears almost no resemblance to my actual life in it. But on the other hand, as a 64 year old, I'm grateful that I'm not going to have to live long in this world that seems to be rolling down over us all like a gigantic frozen shitball. It doesn't sound like a place I'd want to be anyway. 1Reply 7 replies 1179 more comments… © 2021 Matt Taibbi. See privacy, terms and information collection notice Publish on Substack